Continued Deschooling

On an unschooling board, sometime posted a question asking about roadblocks people had to overcome in deschooling their families to unschool.

One lady wrote: "I've been at this a lot of years, and am now helping my daughter unschool her kids, so it's been a long time since I've deschooled!

"But one thing I remember struggling with is that my kids wouldn't want to participate in activities I though they should want to participate in.  For example--homeschool events.  They just weren't interested.  And I'd be like, 'But if you'd just go, you'd enjoy it, I'm sure. There are nice kids there...'

"I'd pressure them big time to go, thinking if I could just get them there, they'd realize how fun it was, and sometimes they sort of enjoyed themselves, but it took a lot for me to accept that it's okay for very strong introverts to shun social activities.

"Even unschooling conferences--I would have gone to a lot more if my kids had enjoyed them. They didn't enjoy hotels and would constantly say, 'When are we going home?'

"I let go of math and reading lessons a lot quicker than I let go of society's expectations that all kids enjoy being social."

Oh my goodness, this rings so true to me! I respect my daughter's intuition to learn what she needs to know, but then assume I have better ways to meet her relational needs than she does. I'm learning not to force these things. Actually, I had an expensive lesson this summer.

I'd signed D up for that awesome programming day camp. This happened before I attended the unschooling conference, or I probably wouldn't have. Anyway, she wasn't thrilled but went with my promise that is never force her to do something like that again.

We were waiting for it to start when one of the counselors came over and asked her to join them in this ice breaker ball game. She teared up, looked at me and moouthed, "Why did you...?" Then she turned around, smiled, and joined. I felt like crap.

The next morning when we showed up, there was no sign of anyone anywhere. We walked around for half an hour and to make a long story short, we later learned that they'd only put signs and stationed people on the east side of the building, assuming everyone would be dropped off in a car. Since we'd walked, the west side was closer for us and we had no way of knowing where they were. Also, the building's main elevators were locked for the summer so you had to go through the leading office to get to the floor where they'd had classes.

I didn't make Daphne go back and ultimately talked them into refunding half of the program cost she to their lousy communication making it impossible for D to participate the second day. Still, I lost more than a couple hundred dollars. But I'm learning.

We're learning. And the individual ways we do that, and connect with people (or don't) are just fine.